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Roundup: IO, Equinix, CloudSigma

Here’s our review of some of this week’s news in the data center industry:

IO selected to support large health-care data center. IO announced that it has been awarded a contract with the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health (CSS Institute), NantWorks LLC and National LambdaRail (NLR), to support the largest health-care data center in the world. IO will provide private cloud computing services at IO Phoenix. "In addition to generating massive volumes of information requiring high-performance IT, the regulatory environment of the healthcare ecosystem also requires a highly protected and reliable infrastructure," said Anthony D’Ambrosi, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. "IO’s high-density and ultra-secure infrastructure enables healthcare IT to accomplish their goals both today and into the future." When completed, the central health-care database will securely store patient information, to be accessible nationally and eventually globally and be connected to LambdaRail, a 12,000 high-performance communications network linking major research institutions throughout the United States.

Equinix opens second IBX in Hong Kong. Equinix (EQIX) announced the opening of the first phase of its second International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Hong Kong. The $63 million investment in the HK2 facility extends Platform Equinix to 99 data centers worldwide across 38 strategic markets. The expansion in the western part of the New Territories region of Hong Kong was driven by demand from financial services and cloud service providers in the region. “Commercial growth and the continuation of Hong Kong’s dominance as a financial hub in Asia are key drivers of demand for data center services in the local market,” said Alex Tam, managing director, Equinix Greater China. “Data centers are an essential part of the city’s infrastructure and the opening of HK2 ensures the supply of data center availability needed to support the sustainable growth of traditional pillar industries such as financial services and trading.”

CloudSigma launches SSD in Public Cloud IaaS. During the 2011 Cloud Computing Expo CloudSigma launched the industry’s first solid-state drive (SSD) storage solution for a public cloud IaaS environment. As I/O operations become even more random in multi-tenant, public cloud environments, magnetic storage solutions that rely on physical, spinning disks simply cannot keep up. Using a multi drive-to-server model the ability exists to create a tiered storage system and stage critical application data and files on SSD. “With our new SSD storage product, companies can, for the first time, easily handle the random nature of I/O loads in public clouds while minimizing necessary servers and realizing significant cost savings. Because the storage performance of hard drives has not kept pace with server performance or networking bandwidths, incorporating an SSD storage solution was a necessity, and will significantly expand the breadth of computing tasks that our public cloud can handle effectively," said Patrick Baillie, CloudSigma CEO.